A historian is a stove-keeper: the season
With its expected and unforeseen fluctuations in temperature
Dictate whether his job is to gather fuel or feed the fire
Before me...
Finest wood
Conventional wisdom says the oldest histories are the best seasoned
And produce the most energy in the shortest time
In the 8th Generation, when the textile villages
"Father Podzvonny walked his dog down Mykhailivska every Sunday
He hoped to hear the bells
Man and dog"
Tell me what to do with this?
It is always only winter now
We play chess, drink tea once a week
In the library in the city, there were four books left
Some villages still had one or two of their own, stored in root cellars
It was harder to find the ledgers which recorded what had once been put up
And what had been burned, but our historians are diligent and I knew they were there
I found oral histories on magnetic tapes
I have it all now
The most ruthless cousins are the hopeful ones
We sent transmissions while those who had lived on earth lived
My own experience finally convinced me
That one should not judge a society by the way it collapses.
We need more than words in books and tapes to understand the past
But we never produced archeologists
Everything has always been reused
What we couldn't reuse, we consumed
So I don't know how to interpret the ruins
We scavenge the barns of Village 20 and I wonder
Why is the joinery so different from the barns of Village 4?
There is no one in either place to ask
This shirt I found with orange yarn for ties: who wore such a color?
Or was it the fashion?
What did they grow or mine that bled so rich a dye?
And the knots, still fastening the lower placket!
So elaborate, so occult!
And did the wearer always leave them tied or just that last time?
I tried to tell a story
But I'm still baffled by the places where things join with other things